The rehab centres that lock up addicts against their will

In Guatemala, behind barred and locked doors, thousands of drug addicts are offered treatment by Protestant churches. Christianity offers salvation for some but many are held against their will, and some are swept off the street by "hunting" parties.

"They grabbed me. They found me completely out of it on the streets, and they just grabbed me."

Marcos is a big guy. With closely cropped hair, and a huge expanse of chest, he is not the kind of man to tackle lightly. But Marcos was accosted by a group of men in Guatemala City and forcibly taken to a private, Christian rehabilitation centre.

"I was there for about a month and a half, and nobody knew anything about me. People thought I was killed or something, because that's what happens in Guatemala."

"I saw terrible things in that rehab - the owner used to beat up the girls. He would tie up the guys and roll them up like a taco in a piece of carpet, and leave them there for hours," he says.

Marcos was freed when a friend came looking for him, and demanded his release. He doesn't think enforced rehab is the right approach and says it did nothing to help him quit his alcohol and drug habit.

"People came out madder and more furious. Instead of being rehabilitated, you just went out to get high again."

Marcos grew up in the United States - a refugee from Guatemala's civil war in the 1980s - but was deported back to his parents' homeland after serving a prison sentence. With family in California, the owner of the rehab centre saw Marcos as a money-making proposition - he tried, and failed, to get contact details for Marcos' family to ask them for money for Marcos' keep.

All that is behind him now - Marcos is clean, and is dedicated to mentoring young people.

As there is no residential, state provision for addicts in Guatemala, private rehabilitation facilities have filled the vacuum. There may be as many as 200 Christian centres in Guatemala, possibly holding 6,000 people, estimates Dr Kevin O'Neill, from the University of Toronto, who has made an anthropological study of the centres. It is not known how many of them practice the aggressive "hunting" Marcos experienced.

Bakudaily.Az